Robots are widely used to perform various tasks such as welding, assembling, painting, and the like in industrial manufacturing sites. Further, robot utilization fields are gradually expanding across all industrial and service fields including a personal service field providing services in surroundings of a human life and a professional service field providing specialized services such as medical care and the like.
Particularly, in recent years, with the rapid growth in a logistics market, it has become very important to increase a processing speed through automation of logistics, and in order to meet such a need, development of a picking robot for picking up cargo and a transfer robot for transferring cargo is actively underway.
In the picking robot among such robots, a gripper is necessarily required to pick up atypical objects, i.e., objects of various shapes, sizes, and materials, in order to implement automation of logistics.
The gripper includes a mechanical gripper capable of mechanically picking up an object by having a plurality of fingers driven by a hydraulic pressure or a pneumatic pressure, and a vacuum gripper capable of picking up an object by generating a vacuum on an interface between the vacuum gripper and the object. Further, known is an electroadhesive gripper for picking up an object using an electrostatic force generated when current flows through a conductor.
However, the mechanical gripper and the vacuum gripper have limitations in picking up objects of various sizes and shapes without damage with an appropriate pressure, and thus the mechanical gripper and the vacuum gripper are not effective for picking up atypical objects, and in order to pick up a heavy object, a conventional electroadhesive gripper should have a large contact area and a large voltage should be applied to the conventional electroadhesive gripper, so that the conventional electroadhesive gripper has a limitation in picking up the atypical objects.
Therefore, it is still required to develop a gripper capable of picking up atypical objects.